Australian Troops Command E. Timor

Refugees Cautiously Emerge To Celebrate

September 25, 1999|By New York Times News Service.

DILI, East Timor — As departing Indonesian soldiers marched toward this city's port on Friday, the foreign troops who are replacing them staged an aggressive show of force, sealing off and searching the city center for hours as helicopters circled and clattered above them.

Refugees crawled from cardboard shelters to watch Australian soldiers sweep through their burned-out neighborhoods, fingers on their triggers, as if on the front lines of a war.

The commander of the operation, Lt. Col. Nick Welch, said it was intended to send a message to the frightened refugees and to any potential troublemakers that Dili belonged to the international force now.

"With the random looting and fires," Welch said, "there may have been the perception that we were not fully in control. The reality is we are capable of carrying out our mission."

The show of force, together with the visible departure of Indonesian troops, sparked the first spontaneous celebration in Dili of the victory of East Timor's vote for independence in a referendum on Aug. 30.

Starting with two boys on bicycles, it grew to 15 men on motorcycles and then to a pickup filled with whooping, chanting celebrators who waved the green-blue-and-white flag of the East Timorese independence movement.

"Thank you for coming," shouted a motorcycle rider, Jose Antonio, 21, as he drove past an Australian guard post.

But one man on a van, Mario Victor da Costa, who wore a pale blue UN cap, said that as soon as darkness fell, the revelers would leave the streets because "we are still afraid at night."

Welch said that no shots had been fired in the sweep, which lasted through the afternoon and into the night and that his troops had met no resistance. But it also appeared that they made few arrests of armed men and seized only a few weapons.

In an earlier report, the international force had said it made its first arrest of a senior member of the violent militias that laid waste to much of the region in the last three weeks, Caitano da Silva.

Despite the show of force, military officers conceded that they did not have full control of Dili and that it would take far longer to enforce security in the rest of the territory.

"How long is a piece of string?" one colonel said when asked for a time estimate.

A formal military handover of the territory from the Indonesian troops who have occupied it for 24 years to the international force that began arriving on Monday is to be completed in a few days, the top generals of both forces said at a news session. In Jakarta, Gen. Wiranto said the handover would take place on Monday. But announcements in Jakarta often have little connection with events in East Timor.